


Always the Fire

by Miss_M



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Character Study, Fire, Gen, Memory Related, Post-IT (2017), Psychological Horror, Racism, Trauma, Vacation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-29
Updated: 2020-07-29
Packaged: 2021-03-04 22:27:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,648
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25403836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/pseuds/Miss_M
Summary: Mike goes on vacation. Trouble is, he takes Derry with him.
Comments: 10
Kudos: 11
Collections: Multifandom Horror Exchange (2020)





	Always the Fire

**Author's Note:**

  * For [scorpiod](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scorpiod/gifts).



> I own nothing.

The weekend before he started his new job, Mike withdrew a couple hundred dollars from the bank, got in his grandfather’s old pickup, and drove out to Deer Isle. 

The ancient wiring under the hood crackled ominously when he turned the key in the ignition, but after a few tense moments when the air inside the car smelled like the aftermath of a lightning strike, the engine turned over with a low, steady roar and set Mike on his way. Mike was still certain that he could smell something burning, either in the car or just by the side of the road – ghost flames licking along beside him for miles and miles down Maine’s county roads. He preferred to avoid the highways, but even so, he got pulled over just outside Waterville. 

The white motorcycle cop made Mike stare at his own reflection in the cop’s aviator shades rather than look him in the eye, man to man. Mike said “yes sir” and “no sir” and “just going to the beach for the weekend, sir” and “yes sir, working on my tan” and “truck was my grandfather’s, he died last year, me? I’m a librarian, I start on Monday, no sir that’s the truth,” till finally the cop stopped tapping Mike’s license against his palm, and told him to watch the speed limit, and walked back to his bike with one last glance at Mike’s taillights, still disappointingly unbroken and functional.

Mike could have sworn he smelled burning rubber long after the cop got tired of following him and peeled off at an intersection, his motorcycle resembling a sleek, black beetle in Mike’s rearview mirror. 

When his knuckles started to ache from gripping the steering wheel and the arrow on his fuel indicator dipped low, Mike pulled into a gas station with only one other car parked out front. A man in a baseball hat leaned against the car’s bumper and watched Mike climb out of his truck, pump gas, and walk inside. 

“How you doing?” Mike said politely. 

The man said nothing, just hawked up a loogie at the oil-stained tarmac at his feet. 

One of the halogen tubes bathing the store in sickly white light, like inside a hospital, buzzed and crackled on the ceiling. The owner caught Mike looking at it, said: “Goddamn old wiring. Burn the place down one day, blow us all to kingdom come.”

From his tone, Mike couldn’t quite tell if the man was stating a possibility, making a threat, or extending Mike an offer. He paid for his gas and some chewing gum. He eyed the packets of beef jerky by the register, but Leroy Hanlon’s voice was loud inside his head, _why you want to spend money on meat when we got three dozen sheep out there? Use your head, boy._

He could feel the man with the baseball hat staring at his back while he crossed the tarmac to his truck and climbed inside. By the time he reached Deer Isle an hour later, his jaw muscles ached with how vigorously he’d been chewing gum, its flavor long gone, and he was exhausted after just a three-hour drive. The woman who ran the B&B by the beach wanted to know where his truck came from, didn’t offer her condolences when Mike told her his grandfather had left it to him in his will. 

That night, Mike slept like the dead, the only sounds surrounding him the gentle creaking of an old clapboard house settling in the damp sea air and the soughing of waves as the tide went out. No laughter Mike couldn’t trace to a visible person, no phantom smoke or crackle of sparks. Just sea and wood and sand. 

By noon on Saturday, Mike decided that the beach had been a better idea than it was a reality. Even out of season, there were too many people at the beach for him to truly relax, and the water was cold. His skin felt hot and prickly, the dried salt made him itch, and his brand new swimming trunks took forever to dry. Still, the constant, salty breeze filling his lungs felt good, and the sight of the green ocean lapping against the shore, white foam coming in and in and in till kingdom come yet leaving no trace, soothed him. 

He realized with a start that he’d needed soothing, then tried to list all the reasons why that might be. His grandfather’s passing – his grandfather while alive – his parents, burning – his friends, who’d all left Derry one by one – Henry Bowers and his gang – the sheep, the sheer carcasses – the traffic cop – the man at the gas station – the woman who owned the B&B – every single person he knew in Derry ( _except the Losers_ , Mike reminded himself, hated that he needed to remind himself) – and… It. 

None of it seemed real, more like picture postcards of things that happened years ago to someone else, and Mike had picked them up at a rummage sale, tied in a bundle with kitchen string, and was flipping through someone else’s memories. Even the clown was flattened into a paper cutout grotesque, no sharp teeth, no bite. 

Maybe this was why people came to the beach, Mike thought – the water and the breeze smoothed everything away, like polishing a pebble. 

He didn’t remember why this sense of calm, of being soothed and smoothed out, was an illusion and therefore not to be trusted for several hours, while he changed back into his clothes, and took a walk through town, and looked for a place to get some ice cream but found all the ice-cream stores boarded up out of season. Only when he sat down in a diner to get some dinner, and the electric griddle suddenly shot flames up toward the ceiling like a bonfire, and the short-order cook swore and yelled at the waitress that he’d tell the owner to buy a new griddle or he _would_ quit this time, _I mean it goddammit! Look at this, it burned the hairs clean off my arm!_

“Aw, shut up with your bellyachin’!” the waitress shot back, then turned to Mike in his booth, clicking her pen against her shoulder and pulling a notepad out of her apron. “What can I get ya? Hey, mister, you’re all… ashy. You alright?”

Mike swallowed, his temples throbbing and his palms sweating, and stole another glance at the griddle – no scorch marks on the wall or the ceiling, no trace of fire, not even a smell of hot metal or fried wiring in the air. Just the aroma of grease, coffee dregs, air stirred about by a ceiling fan, maybe a hint of ocean breeze. 

Mike forced his hands to move, picked up his menu and ordered blind. 

“Ayuh, be right back with your drink,” the waitress said and smiled at Mike. Her teeth were small and even and straight between her red-rouged lips.

On the walk back to his B&B, he kept hearing snatches of voices, always just beyond the streetlights, back behind the corner he’d just passed: children out past their bedtime, laughing, singing songs with words carried away on the ever-present ocean breeze.

On Sunday morning, Mike checked out right after breakfast, and the B&B owner didn’t try to convince him to enjoy a few more hours at the beach, milk a bit more pleasure from his vacation, before he headed home. While she counted out his change, Mike glanced at the Sunday newspaper lying on the counter: the main gas tank at a service station outside Waterville had blown up late on Saturday afternoon, the headline on the local rag proclaimed above a grainy photo of a burned-out husk of a building, the twisted remnants of the pumps out front melted by the heat, like modernist sculptures.

Mike took the long way around on his drive back, swung out past Skowhegan and Farmington before he turned south and finally risked getting on the highway because he was getting tired and tomorrow was his first day at work. While his truck hurried closer and closer to Derry, and the fall twilight thickened even earlier than usual when storm clouds overtook Mike near Farmington, his nostrils filled with the scents of flesh burning, wood and brick scorching in the heat, the familiar ozone smell of a lightning strike. 

Only the last of those was real – the other scents belonged to a house that no longer stood on Harris Street and an event which was over and done with long ago, but no matter how much Mike told himself it was all in his head, the scents wouldn’t leave him be. Mike switched on his windshield wipers and listened to the roar of the truck’s engine, trying to discern the crackle of the wiring, to catch the burning reek of gasoline before it happened for real. The dashboard was cool under his palm, and remained so no matter how often he touched it. 

He passed a speed limit sign and tapped the brakes, going five below, although the road was empty and the weather too foul even for traffic cops, then sped up a little because going too slow wasn’t a good idea either. Mike’s world was water down his windshield, trees and road melting ahead and beside him, the scent of upholstery and his own sweat, but all that liquid matter couldn’t conceal the other reality he knew was there: the gas station behind him, the house on Harris Street ahead of him, the phantom flames which never went out. The fire – always the fire – kept pace with him like hunting dogs running alongside his truck, red lips pulled back in a snarl. 

He passed another sign: _Derry 25 miles._ His knuckles ached on the steering wheel, and the rain obscured the road ahead like black smoke.


End file.
